Every surgery carries with it some risks. Doctors make poor choices for a variety of reasons. A lack of sleep, experience, oversight and feeling rushed are some of the factors that may cause a doctor or their medical staff to make mistakes. This type of negligence can result in serious surgical errors.
Wrong patient surgeries are far more common than they should be. In 2015, doctors in Tennessee performed a tongue clipping surgery on the wrong newborn.
This procedure is often performed to help babies with breastfeeding. It wasn’t until the baby’s mom went to pick up her child that she noticed blood emanating from this mouth. She asked doctors about it, and she was informed that doctors had wrongfully performed the procedure on her child instead of the one that should have received it.
California’s physician licensing board revoked the professional license of one doctor after it was discovered that he’d removed one patient’s healthy kidney, leaving his failing one behind.
A doctor in Texas was arrested and charged with multiple assault counts after police amassed evidence that suggested that he’d caused a patient to bleed out and die, operated on the wrong side of another’s spine and left a surgical sponge inside of a third one.
In another instance, an army veteran in Connecticut had a scalpel left in his abdominal area after undergoing a prostatectomy.
While the patients involved in most of these cases survived their doctors’ errors, many of them had to deal with the pain and anguish of not knowing what was going on with them up until their conditions were diagnosed. Some of them were left with long-term adverse effects from their doctors making such grave errors.
Doctors are supposed to run down a list of questions to make sure that they’re operating on the right patient, planning to perform the correct procedure and that they haven’t left anything behind in them before stitching them up. Georgia law does afford victims the right to sue doctors who engage in negligence. A medical malpractice attorney in Augusta can advise you of the legal remedies that you may be able to pursue in your case.